Michelle Williams

As part of my ongoing campaign of sassiness, I am trying to inject a bit more "oomph" in my appearance. Overall, this isn't that hard. Although I've never worn much makeup or had very elaborate hairstyles, I've always had strong ideas about my hair and clothes, to the point of often having stated theories and philosophies about them. I like to think about clothes in terms of "outfits", which you would wear out to school/work/dinner/the grocery store, as opposed to "just clothes" that you'd wear around the house - though I see no reason why those shouldn't be cute and colour-coordinated, too.

However, for the last year or so, I've been working in architecture practices, and it may be a cliche and by no means universal, but architects do generally wear a lot of black and have very serious black-framed glasses. I wear black-framed glasses but they aren't heavy enough to be very serious. Anyway, being around architects has meant that I've somehow ended up with a very dark wardrobe. I say somehow; last autumn I went out shopping with a list that read: trousers, blouses, jumpers - black, navy, grey only. I think that had something to do with it.

So I'm currently re-injecting colour into my routine. The first big success has been red. Boy, do I like red. In fact, last week I had to acknowledge that it is my official favourite colour, edging out pink/green, a combo that has been number one for probably 8 years now. This acknowledgement came after we'd gone out for our friend Sean's birthday and I wore a red skirt, a red t-shirt and a red flower in my hair. It was kind of hard to miss - like a red flag, if you will.

So that's the wardrobe component sorted. I've not made any real changes to my make-up routine, since I don't like to wear too much, though I am now wearing mascara every day. Well, on days when I leave the house. But today, I'm focusing on getting a new haircut. This is such a fraught subject. In March, I went to a very fancy salon and got what turned out to be the most expensive haircut of my life. The cut itself was pretty pricey, but it was the colour (which I didn't love) and tipping the stylist, the colourist, the guy who washed my hair and the girl who gave me the aromatherapy mini-massage that put the expense over the top. But I loved my hair! It was sort of messy on purpose, so it never looked like it was messed up. Does that make sense? Matthew said he thought it was the best haircut I've ever had (though he might have been trying to help me feel better about spending £187 at the salon). And, yes, it really did cost that much. Check the exchange rate - are you choking on whatever you were eating/drinking? After a while, I went back, but the second time around, it just wasn't as good. It was a good haircut, but not magical and maybe not worth £85 (no colour that time). Since then, I've had a trim at a cheapy little place in Covent Garden, but it's getting to the point where I have to do something. I don't want a drab, yucky haircut. I want something cute. Something sassy. Something a little bit like Michelle Williams is sporting these days.

I consulted Matthew for his thoughts, but he had never heard of Michelle Williams, so I had to give him the following primer:

Michelle Williams is the tragic ex of Heath Ledger and tragic mother of his tragic little girl Matilda. (Does that seem like a funny name for a half-Austrialian child to anyone else? Isn't it like Matthew and me naming our kid Britannia or Yankee Doodle Dandy?) They met when she played his tragic wife in the tragic Broke Back Mountain. She has recently been spotted having dinner with Spike Jonze - I don't know if it was tragic or not. I also read that she is rumoured to keep a diary. Undoubtedly contains lots of tragedy. Oh, and she used to be on Dawson's Creek. Is that tragic? Her ex-boyfriend died, Katie Holmes became a zombie (or not - not looking for a lawsuit here!) and James van der Beek and Joshua Jackson turned out to be much less attractive as grown men than as teenage boys. Could the show be cursed?!? More evidence: the WB network no longer exists and Paula Cole's career hasn't exactly been red-hot lately. Ooh - spooky!

But curses aside, Michelle's hair is pretty cute. I'm going print out the picture, draw on a side part because I can't wear a fringe/bangs, and see if I can get a stylist to make something pretty happen. Exciting, huh? And once he'd seen her picture, Matthew did say that it looked like a haircut that might well suit me, so that's a ringing endorsement from him.

On the subject of eyewear, I feel like if I'm going to wear glasses, I don't want to try to hide the fact by wearing invisible wire framed ones. I'm not ashamed! Just very near-sighted. My friend Krystal and I had a conversation in Scotland that illustrates my feelings on the subject:

Drunk man (thinking he's flirting): Can I see you without your glasses?

Us: Er, whatever. (raising glasses but not actually taking them off)
Drunk man: Wow, you're really pretty. Why do you wear glasses?
Us: So we can see better.
Drunk man: Yeah, but why don't you wear contacts?
Us: To prevent us being attractive to people like you.

This happened some years ago and I can't remember which of us he was trying to flirt with, as we are both really pretty, with or without glasses. But the same thing happened again, almost verbatim, in Austin once when I was out '80s-retro-dancing with my friend Julie. But, for all my fist-in-air, "we're near-sighted, we're here, get used to it!" rhetoric, I am starting to entertain the idea of getting my eyes lasered. I've always been against it, out of a combination of fear of new medical procedures, squeamishness at the thought of someone messing with my eyes, and glasses-wearing pride. But I would really like to be able to wear non-prescription sunglasses.

Italy, part 2

Argh. I don't know what the problem is, but obviously I'm having trouble posting images so that you can open them at a larger size. You know, so that you can actually see the images as opposed to just a small, colourful blob breaking up my text. I will keep working on it, but here are my Italian pictures in a bigger format for your viewing pleasure.

This is Isola Comicina, the island where we saw the attractive (and not quite so attractive) Italian people. We were all so hot by that point that Zach, one of the sons/groomsmen, actually stripped down to his underwear and jumped in the water. It looked so cool and inviting, but all the other guests just looked on with longing, as none of the rest of us were 19 or quite so, um, athletically built, shall we say.

This is the menu from the reception. As you can see, the cover features a lovely painting of Villa D'Este in 1847, which if anything, is even fancier now.

Un Fine Settimana Rapido

A couple of weekends ago, we went to Italy for a quick visit – we flew on Friday, arriving around 7pm, spent all day Saturday attending the wedding of Matthew’s cousin and related festivities, then came home on Sunday. We had a great time, but it was exhausting. And I got sun-burned on my scalp, where I part my hair. Who would think to put sunscreen there? How would you even do that?

The people getting married were Matthew’s cousin Tone and her partner Deen. They have been together for 25 years and have two grown sons, but two years ago, Deen whisked Tone off to a chateau in the south of France and proposed in front of a room full of assembled friends and loved ones. That sounds pretty impressive in itself, but for the wedding itself, they really pulled out all the stops. Thus I attended my very first Norwegian-Nigerian wedding. In Italy. With the adult children of the couple serving as groomsmen. It was awesome.

The wedding was in Como, in the north of Italy. There is no family connection with Italy; as far as we know they picked it because it is absolutely beautiful. We had an unremarkable flight to Milan, then took a train into Como, through very picturesque countryside and little towns. From my admittedly limited observations, I'd say Italians like to have some green outdoor space; almost every place had a little garden or patio or even just a balcony with potted plants and a chair where one presumably sits in the morning and enjoys the first espresso of the day. Although Como itself is fairly flat, it is surrounded by extremely tall, steep hills, which makes for very dramatic scenery. We stayed in the old part of town, which is utterly charming, with the slightly run-down, romantic look of Cinema Paradiso or Il Postino. (We took a taxi back from the reception and saw that the newer part of town is much less charming. It has a lot of concrete buildings that seem to be crumbling in the humidity, rather unromantically.) It was a short, pleasant walk through a couple of piazzas from the station to our hotel, which was itself on a piazza. After a quick freshening up, we went to yet another piazza to meet everyone for dinner. This was quite relaxed - we sat around with some cousins and ate pizza while a street artist recreated "The School of Athens" on the pavement in front of the café and swallows (or swifts or possibly bats - there was much conjecture) swooped down from the cathedral bell tower eating bugs. Then we wandered through a few more piazzas, stumbling upon a Mexican/Cuban band playing an outdoor concert as part of Como's cultural festival, and ate gelato before heading off to bed.

The next day we took a boat cruise from Como to another town down the coast, to a hotel on a hill, where the ceremony itself took place. I don't know the name of the town, only that it was very, very hilly and that the hotel was not really very close to where the boat docked. I think the trek was worth it, though, as the hotel was very pretty and had a fantastic view over the lake. Matthew's young cousin Jake (age 12) kept saying, "Can you believe this is just a 3 star hotel?" like the seasoned world traveller he is. The ceremony itself was lovely, very personal and emotional. A close friend of the couple said a few words, there were two readings, and we all sang the Carpenters' song “On Top of the World”. The mayor of the town came, wearing a very impressive and official-looking tricolor sash, and read long passages from the Italian civil code, making the whole thing legal. These passages were then translated (more or less) into English (more or less) for the benefit of the entire roomful of people there who didn't speak Italian. Tone's sister Anne made a very sweet speech. I got a little misty-eyed, as I often do at weddings, from thinking about love and stuff. I get a bit overwhelmed at times, thinking about Matthew and how utterly surprising and unlikely it was that we ever met. I find weddings the perfect venue for indulging in such sentimental thoughts. It's nice, though, because when I start to get a little freaked out about how easily we could have not met, I always realise that, however improbable it was, we did meet and we are together and I am confident that we always will be because, among other factors, we have fun together, we like so many of the same TV shows, and we have an enormous mortgage together. Oh, the ties that bind... Anyway, after the ceremony, we adjourned to the terrace, where we had a light luncheon. I call it light because it was made up mainly of finger foods, but I realised on this trip that I could eat nibbles, especially crispy, deep-fried ones, for hours and hours without stopping. So not that light. And as we were waiting for the loo afterwards, Matthew and I saw a scorpion. My mother, sister and grandmother have all been stung by scorpions; I never have but I used to be deathly afraid of them, literally screaming and running away like a crazy person whenever I saw one. I guess I'm over that, since I was much calmer with this one. We took some photos, but the camera was still on the black and white setting that Matthew used for the wedding, so instead of scary, the scorpion looks timeless and romantic.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon on the boat, with breaks in another town for gelato and on Isola Comacina, an island where people dock their boats (not yachts, just regular sized ones). This was entirely populated by young, thin, very attractive brown-skinned people and older, overweight, not-so-attractive sun-damaged people. It was like a “before” and “after” for the Italian lifestyle. Along the way, we saw houses belonging to Richard Branson (rather ostentatious, with weirdly sculptured trees), George Clooney (nice, big, traditional-looking) and Donatella Versace (big but not very impressive - a bit boring). Eventually, we arrived at Villa D'Este, the venue for the reception and the fanciest building I've ever been in that doesn't belong to the National Trust. We had more nibbles, posed for more photos, and I was blown away by the beautiful ladies’ room, so much that I went back later and took photos. I will post those pictures later, but let me just say pink marble, real linen handtowels, and, the best part, bidets in the cubicles, which were, of course, lovely little rooms far larger than our bathroom at home. In fact, the whole restroom “complex,” of foyer, hand-washing area and cubicles, was larger than our old flat.

When we sat down to our five course meal, I realised why even if I can eat nibbles for hours, maybe I shouldn’t. I felt very unsettled and could only pick at my salad and risotto. Jake was in even worse shape. Being a 12 year old boy, he has even less self-restraint than I do when it comes to small fried foods and I don’t think he felt good at all. He eventually bucked up, though, and he and our other young cousin Amy (age 10) had a good enough time sticking the heart-shaped confetti all over their faces. I recovered, too, enough to enjoy the main course, which was beef and veal with a big blob of fois gras on top. I know that geese are treated very cruelly in the making of fois gras – so why, oh why must it taste so good?

There were about a dozen speeches, which could have been torturous, but they were all quite short and either funny or sweet or touching. Then there was cake and dancing and then we got a taxi back to Como, where we fell into bed too exhausted to even be very annoyed with our barely air conditioned room.

On Sunday, we had another uneventful flight back home, then got up the next day and went back to normal life. Except for the sun-burned scalp, of course.

A note: Tone's name is Norwegian. When properly pronounced, it is quite musical, with the "o" stretched out and a lift at the end. However, when I (and most other non-Scandinavians) try to say it, it sounds like "tuna." So I just call her "Toni." Deen is short for the rather majestic sounding Moyadeen (unsure of the spelling), but has the benefit of sounding exactly like "Dean" so I can just about manage it.

Goody Two (New) Shoes

Yesterday I got a new pair of Bass Weejuns sent all the way from Connecticut, courtesy of my grandma and mom. Now I'm all set for school to start. Just seven weeks to go. I'll probably buy some books and a notebook or something, too, but this was the most important element of my school supply shopping.

More Amazing News!

I have actually packed up and posted my sister's birthday presents! Only 5 1/2 weeks late!

Once she receives them, I'll post the photos I took before they went in the box. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of them post-wrapping, so you'll just have to trust me that they were ridiculously cute. But then, my presents always are...

Attitude Adjustment

Two Fridays ago, Matthew worked a day shift, which means that he left around 6:30 and I got up at my regular time of 7:00. I sort of woke up while he was getting ready for work - I do that a lot now that he’s gone deaf in one ear and our new routine is that his alarm wakes me up and I shake/nudge/poke him until he turns it off – and he came to say goodbye on his way out. In a bit, I got up, went about my daily ablutions and went to work.

We had plans to meet after work for dinner and a movie that night, but during the morning, I remembered Matthew saying specifically that he would be using his work e-mail that day. I just couldn’t remember why I was supposed to e-mail him. I thought I could just e-mail and ask, but then I realized that I didn’t have his work e-mail address saved anywhere in my work e-mail. So when I had a minute, I browsed through all the e-mails from Matthew that I’ve saved in my Hotmail account to see if he’d ever sent me one from work. Now, Matthew and I met five years ago and since at that time he lived in London and I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, we spent the first 16 months of our relationship communicating primarily via e-mail. Often, we wrote several times a day, so we're talking about a lot of e-mail. Being a sentimental person, I seem to have saved almost every single one of those messages. I did lose a bunch of the very oldest ones in a Yahoo-related mishap, but there are still plenty. Some might say, more than enough.

I spent most of the afternoon reading dozens of old messages, which I found extremely entertaining. We were obviously trying to impress each other, but who wouldn’t have been impressed with a couple as witty, romantic, quirky, sweet and really, genuinely funny as we were. Matthew’s messages were great, of course, but I was especially struck with the picture of myself that emerged – funny, confident and sassy. This, even though I clearly remember actively pining for Matthew during my last few months in Lawrence. Of course he’d fall in love with that girl, I thought. She’s awesome!

Then I compared that girl to the way I’ve been for the past little while – instead of funny, confident and sassy, I’ve been feeling snarky, insecure and irritable. Still funny, of course, but in a cranky sort of way. I could imagine someone who’d fallen in love with the e-mail girl might feel slightly annoyed at the current state of things. And, to be honest, it was a lot more fun to be that girl than to mope around and be grumpy most of the time.

So I decided to do something about it. The next day I got a haircut and it’s been blue skies ever since! It hasn’t really, but I’ve actually maintained a positive attitude fairly consistently for almost two entire weeks. I feel like I’m remembering how to be myself. I’m having more fun with my clothes, thinking in terms of “outfits” and concepts and getting excited about dressing up for a birthday party or a leaving do or…a Tuesday. I made curtains for our kitchen window from a sweet little vintage print that my mom gave me. There’s enough left over that I might make an apron - or a skirt – or maybe a kerchief (as skirts can be tough to get just right). In addition, I have planned out several sewing projects that I think I might actually get around to doing. My plants are doing great and I’m starting to think about food crops for next year. I’ve become a weekday vegetarian (trying to only eat meat on weekends – but then it’s sausage, bacon and hot dogs for two days straight!). I’ve started using the phrase “funny, confident, sassy” as a sort of mantra which I repeat to myself when I’m feeling tired or deflated or lumpy; I think it actually improves my posture. I am considering getting my eyes lasered – but I’m also considering getting big, old-fashioned cat-eye glasses. Honestly, this is so much more fun that wearing very baggy grey clothes and complaining about English people all the time!

Oh, and I eventually just called Matthew at work to see why I was supposed to e-mail him. Apparently, I had asked him if he would be available on e-mail during the day and he said yes, on his work address. I was too asleep to remember asking (or why I did) later.